Fostering morphological awareness in the teacher trainee class: some reflections on -ous and rival adjectival suffixes

Italian graduates join a two-year teacher training programme to be awarded qualified teacher status in secondary school. At this stage, developing teacher’s language awareness (Wright & Bolitho 1997; Andrews 2003) and metalinguistic knowledge is as imperative for effective teaching as enhancing language proficiency and pedagogical skills (Derwing, & Munrow 2005; Llurda (Ed.) 2005). As important as it is to develop morphological awareness though, it is not easy for non-native teacher trainees to verbalize and exploit explicit knowledge of L2 morphology. English suffixes that derive adjectives from nouns show extensive overlap in meaning and selectional preferences (e.g. Bauer, Lieber, & Plag 2013; Dixon 2014), which results into a plurality of (morphological) translation equivalents (Lowie 2001) in Italian. Setting up parameters of variations is expected to help teacher trainees turn second-order rules and preferences spelt out in the relevant literature into acceptable first-order rules (or rules of thumb) required by a teacher and appropriate to the learner context. We thus try and devise a set of parameters for comparison and analysis of English adjective-forming denominal and deverbal suffixes of possession (Hamawand 2011; see also Grossmann & Rainer 2004; Bauer, Lieber & Plag 2013: translational suffixes): -(er)ous, -(t)ious, -(s)y/-(s)ey, -ful, -some and related suffixes (-able, -ive, -ing). More particularly, we explore examples taken from children’s literature that exploits language play (Cook 2001) and creative errors (Rodari 1973) – specifically, Roald Dahl’s The BFG and its Italian translation, Il GGG. This shall enable us to provide some initial suggestions for building tasks and activities that can foster and encourage teacher language awareness (Andrews 2005; Ellis 2009). The motivation for focusing on creative errors is to be found in the contribution that in-class discussion of relevant grammaticality judgements can offer to verbalizing first-order rules and encouraging teacher (trainee)’s morphological awareness.